About the book:
These poems have the weight of something dredged up from below the soil animals, violence, landscape, myth. Hughes writes as if language itself is a thing you hunt.
"I kill where I please because it is all mine" that's the hawk, but it's also Hughes.
He was Sylvia Plath's husband, outlived her by 35 years and never spoke publicly about her death.
Birthday Letters, his final collection addressed to her directly, came out the year he died.
This Selected is the work that exists between those two silences.
Faber edition.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Wear to cover as pictured.
Tape used on edges of book.
Age related tanning to pages.
All pages well bound and intact.
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About the author:
Ted Hughes (1930 to 1998)
Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England, in 1930, and raised amid the rugged moors and industrial landscapes of the north. The son of a carpenter who had been a soldier in the First World War, he developed an early, visceral connection to nature through hunting, fishing, and exploring the wild countryside with his brother. These formative experiences, along with the mythic power of the Yorkshire landscape, shaped his worldview as a poet attuned to primal forces, violence, and the raw vitality of the natural world.
His literary breakthrough came with The Hawk in the Rain (1957), which won immediate acclaim, followed by powerful collections like Lupercal (1960). Hughes style is muscular and mythic, characterized by vivid, sometimes brutal imagery, rhythmic intensity, and a shamanistic engagement with animals and archetypes. He became one of Britains most celebrated poets, serving as Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.
Hughes drew inspiration from English metaphysical poets like John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the visionary William Blake, T.S. Eliot, and the mythic scholarship of Robert Graves. He was also influenced by folklore, shamanism, and non-Western traditions. In turn, he influenced countless poets and writers, standing adjacent to contemporaries like Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, and his wife Sylvia Plath, with whom his intense and ultimately tragic marriage ended with her suicide in 1963.
Recurring themes in his work include the violence and beauty of nature, the struggle between instinct and civilization, myth and transformation, grief and redemption, and the elemental forces of life and death. Major works include The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Crow (1970), Cave Birds (1975), River (1983), Wolfwatching (1989), and the deeply personal Birthday Letters (1998).
In his later years, Hughes lived in Devon, continuing to write poetry, translations, and childrens books until his death from cancer in 1998 at age 68. His legacy as a towering figure in modern poetry endures. Ted Hughes unique contribution lies in his ferocious re-enchantment of the natural world, restoring to English verse a visceral, mythic power that confronts the savagery and wonder at the heart of existence.
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